UK's Biggest Customer-Facing Implementation of Node.js - <AUTHOR>

The Times and the Sunday Times will be launching an exclusive new dining experience, "Eat Out" which will provide hundreds of pounds of savings at a huge range of restaurants across the UK.
The innovative new strategy is coupled with bleeding-edge technology to deliver fantastic offers of great value to the brands' loyal customers. The "Eat Out" site was designed and built by award-winning digital agency Clock Limited. Following on from the delivery of SunPerks.co.uk, Clock developed the entire site using new technology, Node.js.
Much like LinkedIn's app overhaul, what's on the surface may not be that spectacular to most but what's fuelling the engine underneath is extremely exciting for techies. The site has been built with extremely young technology, barely a year old, and enables far more utilisation of servers and hardware than ever before; cutting server down-time and boosting response rates. This is down to the much fabled Node.js; a Joyent-sponsored, server-side technology which is rapidly accruing attention in the web-development world.
For News International, Clock Limited also built the parent loyalty website mytimesplus.co.uk , which has been received extremely well by its new and existing members. The 'Eat Out' card will be available initially as an exclusive benefit for Times and Sunday Times subscribers and will then be rolled out as a standalone product similar to Taste and Gourmet Society in early 2012. The card will be sold for approximately £50 but remains as a complimentary benefit to Times+ members (subscribers of the two newspapers). And by joining Eat Out, members will be able to take advantage of a range of great dining offers throughout the year at more than 700 top restaurants across the UK.
Andrew Sharland, Clock Limited"s Business Director, said: "The industry is rapidly evolving and News International are clear market leaders in the monetisation and access of their content. Matching this, we"ve used cutting-edge technology for the new service so it"s great to be on-board with such a courageous and innovative approach."
Jo Coughlin, Head of Partnerships, The Times and Sunday Times, said: "The Eat Out Card is a new and innovative value offering from The Times and The Sunday Times. This is our biggest and best dining offer yet which will see members making huge savings eating out at their favourite restaurants all year round. "As we value our loyal customers the most, we are offering this exciting new benefit as an ongoing addition to the subscription pack via Times+."
Paul Serby, CTO of Clock Limited discusses the decision to use Node.js and the team's transition from PHP. "The decision to migrate, particularly on such a big project, was because of previous difficulties with PHP memory allocation, where our developers often found scaling hard as memory is quickly exasperated."
The critical element about node, which is too often glazed over, is that it harmonises three platforms, allowing one language for browsers, apps and databases all written in JavaScript. So it's no longer a case of PHP for web, JavaScript for apps and SQL for databases. "It's one set of tools, one development process and crucially, one skill for people to learn." This implementation for Eat Out is one of the most important to date as the developers are monitoring how well Node performs not just on a virtual server but actually out there "in the wild". The site's results will be strong indicators of the shape node will begin to take in a commercial industry and how it can be adopted.
Times and Sunday Times subscribers can make the most of this new benefit by going to mytimesplus.co.uk Restaurants can join the scheme by contacting Iain on email@example.com
www.clock.co.uk For Info: firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> 89hm,n / would be good if more copmanies used node

</comment><comment><USER3> Node rules!</comment>


How a Mexican Drug Cartel Makes Its Billions (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/how-a-mexican-drug-cartel-makes-its-billions.html

<comment><USER2> 2012

</comment><comment><USER3> ftw?</comment>


The Verticals Hardest to Find Complimentary Cofounders - <AUTHOR> http://founderdating.com/hardest-verticals-find-complimentary-cofounders/

<comment><USER2> Great use of Founder Dating data.</comment>


Where to hack if you don't like coffee? (in SF) - <AUTHOR>

I love the idea of hacking in coffee shops (change of scenery, available snacks, meeting new people) while working on projects, but I don't like coffee!
What are your suggestions for "coffee-shop like" places in San Francisco I can work at?
The minimum criteria look something like this:
- No Cover
- WiFi (I'm willing to pay a small amount, perhaps 10$/day).
- Open until ~8pm (but later is better)
- Serves food and drink
- Geek friendly (some places have free WiFi, like some McDonalds, but if you sit there with a laptop for an hour, both the patrons and the staff get fairly irritated with you IME) <comment><USER2> I really don't like coffee either, so I stick to tea and blended drinks. Pretty much every coffeeshop will have one or the other.

</comment><comment><USER3> What are some places in SF that are open later than 8-9pm? Coffee shops or similar venues work- I just lose some of my momentum after heading back home if I still have work to do in the evening.

</comment><comment><USER4> Was in SF for a month library, besides lots of places to plug in and work uninterrupted, the main branch has a huge selection of computer books.

</comment><comment><USER5> The public library is pretty good. Snacks are an issue, potentially.

</comment><comment><USER6> It gets a lot of hate, but Starbucks meets all these criteria.

</comment><comment><USER7> Samovar Tea Lounge!</comment>


Where do all the neurotics live? - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/04/where_do_all_the_neurotics_live/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone know what that's supposed to be a map of?

<comment><USER3> It's a map of Neurotic People. "based on data on hundreds of thousands of people compiled by psychologists, Jason Rentfrow at Cambridge University and Sam Gosling at the University of Texas" From a book called Who's Your City, by Dr. Richard Florida. More maps here: [http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2008/...](http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2008/03/the- personality.html)

<comment><USER4> This looks like humor. The heavily-Scandinavian upper Midwest is a hotspot of extroverts? Ohio, Kentucky and Oklahoma are heavily neurotic?</comment></comment></comment>


NSA Documents Suggest a Close Working Relationship Between NSA, U.S. Companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-documents-suggest-close-relationship-between-nsa-us-companies

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441055)</comment>


Shady Numbers and Bad Business: Inside the Esports Bubble - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/as-esports-grows-experts-fear-its-a-bubble-ready-to-po-1834982843 <comment><USER2> Great article with in-depth reporting.</comment>


10 Linux commands you've never used - <AUTHOR> http://bashcurescancer.com/10-linux-commands-youve-never-used.html

<comment><USER2> Eh, I've used all of those except for _bc_ , _mkfifo_ and _xmlwf_. I only used _ldd_ once ( _maybe_ twice), but the rest I've used many times over the years.</comment>


7 Julia Gotchas and How to Handle Them - <AUTHOR> http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/7-julia-gotchas-handle/ <comment><USER2>
      a = [1 -2]
      b = [1 - 2]

and this is why APL and J use 1 ¯2 or 1 _2 for negative numbers</comment>


Winners and Losers In The Last-Second Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2012/12/14/winners-and-losers-in-the-last-second-economy/

<comment><USER2> "I finished my second meeting of the day in Jackson Square and needed to get over to the Financial District. So I pressed the button on my phone and the app informed me it would be six minutes. Just then, I got a text from my wife asking where we were meeting for our date night. Argggh! This critical fact had escaped my mind, and I needed to immediately book a restaurant reservation. I pulled up my Open Table app, booked a table for 6:45 pm at a great spot in the Mission called Range. I matter-of-factly returned her text with our plans for the night. Just then my ride pulled up.

We are increasingly living in a last-second economy."

Well, he is. Having to keep track of that kind of dynamic activity would drive me nuts. Which is why I'm in my current circumstances and not his. Still, it's not necessarily "we."</comment>


Someone in New York is pulling emergency brakes, destroying subway commute - <AUTHOR> https://jalopnik.com/new-york-has-a-supervillain-pulling-emergency-brakes-an-1834936243 <comment><USER2> This is interesting

I would be very surprised if this could happen in central london.

1) the tubes are packed and the cabs locked.

2) they would have be murdered by the other commuters.

3) you can't get in or out of the station without being seen on CCTV

4) each train has CCTV coverage.

5) its almost impossible to get out of the tube via the tunnels, without being electrocuted or run over (All but the cut and cover tunnels are <1' bigger than the trains)

For point 2, even in legitimate cases where someone has keeled over, you get death stares. The only time its seen as acceptable is when someone falls inbetween the gap between the train and the platform edge.

<comment><USER3> Regarding 5, emergency brakes in London won't stop the train in the tunnel. They just send a signal to the driver to wait at the next station and inform staff at that station and/or emergency services.

Pulling the emergency brake therefore isn't necessarily a bad idea. If someone has fallen ill on the train (esp. common in summer), it's the best way to ensure that help will be available as soon as possible.

As you said, evacuating trains in the tunnel is dangerous so it's only done if trains physically can't move to the station (e.g. another train blocks the tracks). And even then, evacuation is only done after electricity has been switched off via the end of the train.

<comment><USER4> As for pulling the emergency brake for someone who is unwell, there are frequent announcements on the tube telling you not to do that. The advice from TfL is to wait until the next station and help the person get off.

<comment><USER5> I find it weird that there's so much confusion about the way emergency brakes work and when to use them on the London Underground. If people on HN can't agree on it, how can the general public? Confusion about this sort of thing can be dangerous.

<comment><USER6> That is because people on HN are the general public in a lot of ways. Just because most are specialized knowledge workers doesn't mean they are inherently more intelligent in other areas of life.

<comment><USER7> Intelligence isn't the right word. There are some sort of jobs that _do_ select for high intelligence. Any sort of work that requires abstract reasoning and novel problem solving is going to be inaccessible to people with lower intelligence.

Rather, it should be said that tech workers are not inherently more knowledgeable in matters unrelating to tech than the general public. In this case, knowledge of train function and etiquette is in question, not intelligence.

(Note also that intelligence does not confer knowledge (although it makes knowledge easier to acquire) and that it's quite easy to find examples of people with modest intelligence but exceptional knowledge. Furthermore the work/intelligence selection process only really applies in one direction; there are a lot of high intelligence people who choose jobs they find undemanding because they have different priorities or have had different opportunities in life.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> for a stint i lived on the nyc subway system

one night i woke up flying across a subway car before slamming into one of the vertical hand poles

i was sitting, sleeping, facing the direction of travel and someone had pulled the emergency stop

it was 3am so the only people on the train where fellow transients

this fact must have been prominent in the mind of the person conducting the train because immediately they got on the comm and yelled, 'WHO THE FUCK PULLED THE EMERGENCY STOP?!'

the absurdity of it all helped me ignore the pain in my shoulder

i always slept with my back to my momentum after that night

<comment><USER9> How many others were sleeping on the train?

If lots, how was that allowed to happen? If few, why not more?

<comment><USER8> train? unsure, the car i was in... maybe 2 other transients?

more nyc subway information than you'll ever need:

\- nyc has a globally rare subway in that it is 24hrs

\- you need to be sitting up to sleep on the train, if you lie down you can be removed (was so told by a cop when i was first arrested for sleeping on the train that this is 'the law')

\- subways run the full length of a track, then back, then swap drivers

\- when a driver swaps they have to remove everyone from the train so all transients get up and go across the track to the next train that is waiting to drive off

\- the two longest trains: ORANGE(D,1h-1h15m before driver swap), RED(2,1h30m-2h before driver swap)

\- meaning you could get about ~1h30m of uninterrupted sleep

\- that was until i discovered the L train is driven by software and the conductor is there as a failsafe

\- as such there is a different driver procedure and you can run the train back and forth all day all week without being removed, thats eventually how id get 8h+ nights

someone down thread said 480$/mo for tickets, but id rarely pay

> why not more?

i wondered the same thing, its warm, even in winter, and heavily populated, protecting you from assaults

im unsure what percentage of people without places to sleep choose the subway, but there are some options

there are shelters, but after my experiences there: caging you in or out after curfew, once shut a lawlessness among the people, being placed in rooms with territorial long termers, structurally and hygienically questionable building; i decided id rather risk the street

but it was a winter with a foot of snow on the ground so i tried to sleep in a decommissioned subway stop where there were others sleeping but was woken up by the blunt end of a cop's foot

when i explained i thought it was okay to sleep here because i saw others doing the same the cop responded, 'that guys been there 7 years, get the fuck out of here kid'

hostels at the time cost about 30$/nt for a bunk in a room with 40 people, in brooklyn, so out of my price range but once i got a job i would stay in one once a week to take a shower

> how was that allowed to happen?

compassion, human decency, empathy

i jape, though thats why, im guessing, most riders accept it as a reality

but its probably more to do with poorly handling government resources to address the issue that some people need to sleep sitting up on a subway to have a warm place to rest

<comment><USER10> I appreciate your story and hope you're doing better now. I wonder why there's so little done about not only homelessness, but simply shelter. The homeless don't want to get in the way of people and the people don't want the homeless to get in their way. Yet the side with the resources doesn't seem to care to do much about it.

<comment><USER11> This is the fundemental reason urban places vote for social programs (Democrat) and rural places vote against them (Republican). Homeless people on subways don't affect people that live on farms. The rural urban divide is rational self interest manifested in politics.

<comment><USER12> No, it's not. You'll find plenty of dirt poor rural people that would benefit from entitlement programs just as much and they still vote Republican.

Similarly, Vermont keeps voting in Sanders despite there not being homeless issues there.

Dig deeper.

<comment><USER11> First let's dig more shallow. Op asked why we don't do anything if everyone involved wants something done. The answer is we vote for it and we do do something. It just so happens the severity of the homeless problem is in equilibrium with political will. Now to dig deeper.

>You'll find plenty of dirt poor rural people that would benefit from entitlement programs just as much.

The big difference is in an urban area even the non homeless want to solve homelessness because it's a public nuisance that directly affects them. See any thread here complaining about sf. In rural areas poverty is a much more private problem.

As for Vermont, you're cherry picking. By and large it is undeniable that the Republican/Democrat divide follows an urban rural line. The exceptions are parts of the deep South (where the racial divide is more prominent), and parts of the coasts where liberalism is so dominant even the rural areas are blue. I don't know the mechanism for the latter, but if I had to guess I'd say a big part of the rural population in those areas aren't farmers but retired professionals living in mcmansions. I know people like that but let's not get into anecdotes.

I'm going to double down here. It's not just attitudes on entitlement programs that are influenced by rational interest among urban and rural residents. Literally every hot button political issue can be understood in these terms.

Take guns for instance. Guns in cities are synonymous with gun crime. Owning one is deeply impractical and police response times are fast enough that you don't need one. In a rural area guns are still practical and police response times are slow.

Take endowments for the arts. Guess where the all the state subsidized art ends up. Hint: it's not Topeka Kansas.

Want me to keep going?

<comment><USER13> So it sounds like a more distributed government is a good idea. Metropolitan areas living as city-states, with rural areas having their own rules and laws. Both having separate budgets for local issues.

Speaking of which - if cities and their urban populations want to solve homelessness, why can they not do it on a city-by-city case, locally? A tragedy of the commons type issue, where a city that takes care of the homeless better will have more homeless people heading there?

<comment><USER14> This is a great idea! Maybe restructure the nation as some sort of constitutional republic where the federal government holds limited power (foreign trade, interstate commerce, defence) and the states are left to run day to day matters themselves. We should form a party we could call ourselves Republicans.

I kid but this has been a known problem for two thousand years. The solutions are continually rediscovered, reimplemented and then ignored by later generations that "know better".

"Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms."

\- Aristotle

<comment><USER15> You could do what the EU does, and make the upper house consist of the state governors. That way, for the upper house to approve an increase in federal authority, they actually have to vote to move power from themselves, as individuals, to the lower house (this is a part of why the EU is relatively unimportant compared to the constituent EU nations).

<comment><USER16> That's the way the Senate was (essentially) until we explicitly changed it with the 17th Amendment.

<comment><USER17> Except that senators were not popularly elected, but elected by the state legislature (so corruption was easier). Sending the governors themselves to DC would shift powers back to the state (a good thing, imo), but governors wouldn't have much time left for governance.

I think we could improve upon on current system by adding a vice-governor to the governor's ticket, and subjecting the ticket to the popular vote. Then the governor could send the vice-governor, his popularly elected subordinate, to Congress, which would help shift power back to the states. As it currently stands, senators do not feel a need to pay heed to their states' governors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a south indian who has travelled pretty much all over the world, I cant even describe how I feel reading this article. Because you see, in India, the trains don't even have doors. It is the travellers responsibility to not fall out :D. And then there is such an Emergency pulley in each car with the handle painted red. But since no one has ever used it or changed in multiple decades, it is completely rusted and sealed with dirt. So it is near impossible for any individual to completely pull that lever down. The levers are also directly connected to the trains brake system, meaning you are actually directly applying the brake. I have seen 4 people pulling and hanging on to that lever handle to actually stop the train. Sigh!

<comment><USER19> Okay. This is a bit of an exaggeration. The poster above is talking about long distance trains while the article is about subway trains.

1\. Most trains in India do have doors.

2\. Almost all modern subway in Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai etc do have doors. The trains won't move till the doors are completely shut.

3\. Mumbai is one of the few cities which has an ancient train system which overlaps with the national long distance trains and is separate from the subways but still carries the bulk of the people. Trains/EMUs on this do have doors but people generally don't close these in rush hours.

4\. These days even long distance trains in India have their doors closed shut and you do get reprimanded for trying to keep the doors open (happened to me multiple times)

5\. The part about chains being rusted and difficult to pull is probably true.

6\. Delhi metro (and I suspect others too) don't have chains. You have a button and speaker near every other door to talk to the driver in case of emergency.

7\. Trains have doors. People just don't close them.

<comment><USER18> Didn't mean to exaggerate and it is true that the metros build in the last few years are great. But this is the image of today's suburban train in Chennai. May be I should have clearly mentioned that this is the status in south india rather than india as a whole.

[http://images.newindianexpress.com/uploads/user/imagelibrary...](http://images.newindianexpress.com/uploads/user/imagelibrary/2017/11/4/w600X300/Suburban.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Gotta say, for anyone worried about the surveillance state and stuff, NYC is the perfect city. Through a unique combination of a dense, diverse, super populated metropolis and pure incompetence, you really can disappear in the crowds.

<comment><USER21> That's simply not true anymore. Our NYPD operates the so-called "Domain Awareness System", which is a combination of good old database connected to terminals in patrol cars and precincts, as well as metadata-rich security cameras. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System)

The system doesn't get talked about very much, but even regular patrolmen are trained to use it effectively. It's built to accommodate a variety of use cases ranging from tactical support ("suspect headed north on Amsterdam Ave, but then we lost him - where did he go?") to general investigative duties ("who usually comes by this store on Mondays at 9am?") and, based on what I've heard from cops, works really well.

<comment><USER22> And what about Stingrays tracking cell phones?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't understand. What possible reason is there for an emergency break...

\- If the subway needs to stop via an external decision, there are triggers all over the rails to trigger an emergency break.

\- If you are sick, emergency break is actually worse than waiting to get to the next station.

\- If anything is happening. Emergency break is wrong.

\- If something is in view of the conductor, the conductor will do the correct action.

\- If the train is going too fast, there is already a timer and an automated emergency break triggered on the rails.

I cannot think of a single good reason for this. It's like saying there's a "turn engines off" lever on an airplane next to the bathroom.

<comment><USER24> _I cannot think of a single good reason for this._

The use case is some sort of emergency that the driver may not have seen.

SF's Muni is in the process of onboarding new trams from Siemens. Someone recently stuck their hand in the doors as they were closing. On pretty much any newish tram or subway vehicle this will cause the doors to open again. It's shitty behavior, but that's what people do. Typically trams in the United States have door interlocks such that if the doors are open the vehicle doesn't move. The new Siemens cars apparently don't have well calibrated pinch sensors and the damn thing took off with some idiot woman stuck in the doors, dragging her down the platform.

I've had similar experiences with the older ones (where the drivers would deliberately disable the interlocks — this was before they put tamper evident bits on the override switch). The driver closed the doors as I was boarding. Without looking at his/her mirrors the driver took off as I had one foot on the street and one on the vehicle.

Same deal with people who've fallen onto the tracks.

<comment><USER25> There is absolutely no reason to suddenly stop the train in the middle of a high speed movement between the stations.

Maybe while train still at the station. But not during the movement in the middle of tunnel.

Definitely not relying on random passenger making such decision.

This capability need to be disabled to avoid hurting people. Replace it with the button to communicate with local authorities.

<comment><USER26> That's what the passenger "brake" in the carriages actually does. The brake in the driver cab is the actual thing being used in this article.

<comment><USER24> In San Francisco the emergency stop button in the (older) trams will indeed trigger the emergency brakes directly. I'm OK with this — take a look at the Eschede disaster. One of the passengers was suspicious of all the vibration but decided he didn't have the authority to stop the train. Turns out the eventual derailment stopped the train.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been wondering - how much would it cost to hire people to subtly sabotage a large city in order to cause financial losses. Say you're a nation state and want to mess with your rivals. There's some optimum for how much you can spend to cause your rival to lose a dollar and still come out on top. That will depend in who you are and who your rival is.

It seems like it should be fairly good bang for buck, in this sense, to just hire people to drive around kind of slowly and badly. Nothing overtly aggressive, but a few dozen people driving slowly around a few select traffic circles around rush hour should really gum things up.

Even better if you can cajole some people into, say, pulling emergency stops on subways. Note I don't think that's what's happening in NYC, but this case does seem to show that a few people could cause outsized disturbances just by being assholes.

<comment><USER28> If you want financial losses, you're thinking too small. There's a ridiculous amount of infrastructure one can break. Mostly telco / power / water / ... It's a great testament to how people are mainly not dicks, given how everything keeps working.

Either they're the utilities are exposed [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/ships-anchor-cuts- interne...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/ships-anchor-cuts-internet- cables-to-jersey-jt-2016-11) or the overreaction is very expensive [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/17/portland- flush...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/17/portland- flush-38m-gallons-water-man-urinates-reservoir)

<comment><USER29> The fact that it is criminal, possibly terrorism - prison or worse... might put people off too.

<comment><USER28> We're already talking in the context of: "subtly sabotage a large city in order to cause financial losses" so if it was beneficial in some way, I'm sure you could pay people off to do it for you. They'd either be aware it's illegal, (break this) or not (pee in this lake for $100).

<comment><USER30> The more people involved the greater the chance to get caught.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not a new thing

2017 derailment [https://imgur.com/a/7Bn0bqC](https://imgur.com/a/7Bn0bqC)

2013 ignornace and fuckery [https://imgur.com/a/lPrB0Gx](https://imgur.com/a/lPrB0Gx)

<comment><USER5> Makes you wonder why trains even have an emergency brake. A button to alert people to an emergency, sure, but when does stopping a moving train in a tunnel or the middle of nowhere fix a problem with passengers?

<comment><USER32> When there's a dangerous obstacle ahead?

If I designed a massive, fast-moving, unmaneuverable tube holding dozens of human lives, I think affording it a relatively safe way to arrest that momentum would be essential.

<comment><USER5> If the dangerous obstacle is ahead, the driver is much more likely to see it than the passengers.

<comment><USER33> This guy appears to be using the break in the driver cabs (the unused one meant for when the train is moving in the opposite direction), so unless we got rid of those too it wouldn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> They give the clothes description, general age, and sex of the culprit, but not the ethnicity ... and I can't decide if that's smart or stupid.

<comment><USER35> Ethnicity is often ambiguous or complicated or both, especially in big American cities. If we knew this guy was the child of a Polish Filipino and a Chinese Irish parent would that help us? Thinking that ethnicity is simple and allows people to be easily sorted into meaningful groups is dramatically false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> How is it possible to do such things and not to be caught? Don't they have cameras in the stations?

<comment><USER37> The suspect appears to use the tunnels to escape, not the stations

>Then, he disappears, most likely through the subway tunnels and out an emergency exit.

<comment><USER38> Shouldn't those emergency exits trigger some sort of alarm??

<comment> frosted-flakes The emergency exits in the stations used to, and the signs still say "alarm will sound if opened", but they were disabled around 2014 because there were too many false alarms. Mostly because the emergency exit doors are also used for strollers, luggage, etc. that can't fit through the turnstile, or as a general exit when there's a large group of people exiting.

Case Neistat did a New York Times Op-ed video on YouTube about it, before they were disabled: [https://youtu.be/aUcP5OD-ctQ](https://youtu.be/aUcP5OD-ctQ)

<comment><USER39> Why couldn't they just program an employee ID badge to open the door silently and let the employee open the door for bulk items?

<comment><USER40> You'd be paying somebody to stand there all day at multiple points for each station. This isn't a situation that happens once a half hour, it's every minute or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I heard that people live in the tunnels in New York - is that actually a thing?

If yes, could this be people brazenly deciding they need to get from A to B, climbing aboard at A and stopping the train wherever B is?

<comment><USER42> A few people used to live in the Amtrak tunnels on the Hudson River side of Manhattan. There was a documentary made about them [0]. They were evicted, and the tunnels fenced off, in the late 1990s.

I would be quite surprised if anyone was living in the subway tunnels. Compared to the Amtrak tunnels, they are much narrower. Additionally, people were living in the Amtrak tunnels during a time when the tunnels were unused or seldom used by train traffic. In contrast, subway tunnels see lots of traffic 24 hours a day.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Days_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Days_\(film\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'd call the person more of an asshole than a supervillain.

<comment><USER44> I was thinking microvillain might be more apropos.

<comment><USER45> Yes, it's not useful to inflate the egos of people like this. It will encourage more shitty behavior.

<comment><USER32> Unfortunately the attention economy will always reward attention-seeking behavior - the more violent, the more clicks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I know I would hate him and his shtick if I were a commuter, but I am kind of rooting for his brand of chaos.

<comment><USER47> Some men just want to watch the world burn.

<comment><USER48> Keeping Moloch at bay by throwing sand into the machine.

I've often wondered if the people responsible for planning guideposts in large train stations are doing the same.

<comment><USER49> I'm pretty sure making commutes worse and longer _feeds_ Moloch.

<comment><USER48> Depends on how you look at it, I suppose. It slows him down, a very efficient metropolis would be able to cause much more harm at much greater speed. Strategic sabotage can hinder the war efforts, and it doesn't have to be one large bomb, a thousand needle pricks might have an effect, too, and they are much easier to disguise as incompetence.

"Sorry, we didn't mean to put an ad in front of this important information, we just hadn't considered that people coming up the stairs wouldn't be able to read it."

<comment><USER49> Commute hassle does not come out of productivity. Workers are simply forced to leave their homes earlier and return later, spending less time outside Moloch's grasp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Calling him a super-villain is certainly going to make him stop!

</comment><comment><USER51> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_rolling...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_rolling_stock) says they have about 6,500 cars. The number of cabs is more difficult to find. Given the common rule for newer ones

 _"Cars ending in 1, 5, 6 and 0 have single full-width cabs and are known as "A" cars.

Cars ending in all other digits have no cabs and are known as "B" cars"_

, I guess it is about 40% of that, or 2,600.

So, about 2,600 cameras (motion detectors might already be enough, if the culprit spends sufficient time in the cabin) in the cabs likely would solve the "what do they look like?) problem. Because of the differences in car widths, you even likely need fewer to cover the lines where this occurs a lot.

</comment><comment><USER52> If you're commuting on a New York subway, sorry, but your commute was already destroyed.

</comment><comment><USER53> This points to a possible weakness with Robotaxis: They can be messed with.

<comment><USER54> Don't you think it's a bit less of a problem when it's isolated to a single vehicle intended for private travel? By this logic, it applies to every single road vehicle. What does it matter about whether it has a human or machine brain inside?

<comment><USER55> Get root on the right parts of OnStar's network and it'll affect a heck of a lot more than one vehicle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Cameras, everywhere, surveillance state is the future.

</comment><comment><USER57> Could be pen testing. I wonder the motivations behind the individual(s) doing it.

</comment><comment><USER58> Seems more likely that something is triggering the emergency braking system than some rogue, random dude risking his or her life to pull this stunt that often, AND go undetected.

<comment><USER59> Did you even read the article? People have _seen_ the dude getting on and off trains. There's physical evidence in the form of unlocked safety chains. How does reality "seem unlikely" to you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I don't advocate violence so don't beat the person who is doing this up but... well maybe just a little bit.

</comment><comment><USER61> This guy will be caught soon, with several million angry commuters aware of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER59> Since a lot of people seem to be having trouble with this:

The word is "brake" not "break".

<comment><USER62> English spelling can be so delightfully confusing. Fare/fair also came up in this thread.

For anyone who mixed them up, no harm, no foul! (And certainly no fowl play.)

Of course everyone knows what you meant, and that's what really counts. If you do want to remember the "correct" spelling, I wonder if this will help?

"It's only fair to pay your fare. And please don't pull the emergency brake, so your fellow passengers' bones don't break."

<comment><USER63> I take it you already know

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you,

On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,

To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word

That looks like beard and sounds like bird,

And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -

For goodness sake don't call it deed!

Watch out for meat and great and threat

(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother,

Nor both in bother, broth in brother,

And here is not a match for there

Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,

And then there's dose and rose and lose -

Just look them up - and goose and choose,

And cork and work and card and ward,

And font and front and word and sword,

And do and go and thwart and cart -

Come, come, I've hardly made a start!

A dreadful language? Man alive! I'd mastered it when I was five!

<comment><USER64> A similar but longer poem ("The Chaos") can be found here: [http://ncf.idallen.com/TheChaosPRETTY.pdf](http://ncf.idallen.com/TheChaosPRETTY.pdf)

This version has IPA included, in case anyone knows IPA better than English and wants to try to follow along.

<comment><USER65> I opened that link and was going to comment on the use of IPA - because in the first line I noticed it was using the British pronunciation, 'kriːʧə, rather than the North American pronunciation, 'kriːʧɚ. But in double checking myself, I found something more interesting - the wikipedia article [1] on R-coloured vowels (like the sound at the end of creature, that I was talking about). I thought I was pronouncing the r consonant separately, but instead it's just changing the vowel sound, which is linguistically kind of rare. Neat!

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> One cctv camera in each cab would solve the problem.

<comment><USER67> So would locking the cab that is not in use.

<comment><USER68> Aren't the emergency brake cords on the outside of the engineers' cabs, where anyone can get at them?

<comment><USER67> It would keep the culprit from making his escape through the unused cab, though.

<comment><USER44> Presumably it's left accessible because it's an emergency exit?

<comment><USER23> \- Locking a cab down = in an actual emergency you can't escape the damn train.

\- All conductor cabins are locked when in or not in use.

\- The emergency break is a big red thing on a string that you can pull that is right next to either cab exit that is on the 2 ends of a cab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> The article assumes a "He". Has it been confirmed to be a male or is it assumed anyone wishing to troll the NYC subway lines is male?

<comment><USER70> Not to be snarky, but before writing such a comment you should probably read the article:

> Every New York City Transit employee gave the same description of the > "surfer" they saw riding the back of the train or darting across the tracks: > young, male, wearing black clothing and white sneakers.</comment></comment>


The puzzle of monogamous marriage - <AUTHOR> http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1589/657 <comment><USER2> It's only a puzzle if you think that everything has to have an economic and/or evolutionary explanation. Christianity is a huge factor in the prevalence of monogamous marriages in the West, and indeed, attitudes towards monogomy are changing as fewer Westerners are practicing Christians. Conversely, Christianity is growing pretty rapidly if you look at the world as a whole.</comment>


Java 4 Ever -Trailer  - mite-mitreski http://jz10.java.no/java-4-ever-trailer.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Posted earlier today, see here : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1460896>

</comment><comment><USER2> Excellent production values for a joke.</comment>


Don't Blame Edward Snowden for the Paris Attacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/dont-blame-edward-snowden-for-the-paris-attacks <comment><USER2> I mean, why would ANY rational person blame him?

<comment><USER3> Clearly then, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is irrational. Claims like this make him look like a fool. Although it appears that he didn't name Snowden directly, it was certainly implied.

      The argument, insofar as he and others have articulated
      it, seems to be that terrorists are becoming more
      cautious and more interested in encryption

This bugs me because it makes the assumption that terrorists were previously stupid.

We only have to look at the cartels, who in the last ten years have started building their own high-tech communications systems. They have even gone so far as to employ (sometimes by force), experienced programmers in order to defeat surveillance from the authorities. That predates Snowden, and I'm sure you could find evidence to show that al-Qaieda used encryption before Snowden as well.

ISIS are fighting a war against us. They use guerilla tactics that are terroristic in nature because one does not face the might of a large immovable force head on. It would be like a small wave lapping against a massive sea wall. More effective is to slowly creep into the cracks of the wall, wait for the water to freeze and then split the wall open from inside.

The terrorists were cautious in the first place. They don't use smart phones. Many of them use mobile phones once then throw them away, afraid of being the next drone strike target.

ISIS have a plan to fulfil their prophesy of a Islamic State or 'caliphate'. They want to provoke the west to war, whilst simultaneously isolating moderate Muslims in the west. The suicide bombers and terrorists aren't given this as the primary reason for blowing themselves up and shooting innocent civilians. They are being shown videos of their peers being violently tortured and killed, in order to make them angry. They are being given inspiration to join with their peers against the "oppressors". Then they get given a gun, a bag of amphetamines and in some cases a suicide belt.

The ones we need to worry about are the young men who are being radicalised in the west. Why is it so easy to radicalise these youths? The answer is obvious. Look at the opportunities these youths have in front of them. Racism in France is endemic. I've lived there and witnessed it first hand. The riots in the Paris "ghettoes" in 2005 were a warning sign that got ignored. Now some radical Mullah comes along and gives you a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, a target for your anger and frustration.

It is no wonder that we are losing this battle. The war isn't in Syria. It's right in front of our noses. It's the racism and lack of opportunity combined with the isolation of a disenfranchised angry youth group. Ironically it is Al-Qaieda and ISIS or Daesh (of whatever we want to call them), who have managed to turn us to (quite naturally) be suspicious, angry and racist towards this ethnic and religious groups in our own countries.

One positive thing to take away, is that we could actually do something about this problem. We might not be able to help the ones we already missed, but we can certainly catch the young ones who are about to fall into the same pit that their older brothers and uncles did.

<comment><USER4> >Why is it so easy to radicalise these youths? The answer is obvious. Look at the opportunities these youths have in front of them.

That doesn't explain high school students joining ISIS from most affluent area in Finland. These people had wealthy parents and most unrestricting passport in the world. Why ISIS, why not Bahama, Egypt, Quatar, Saundi-arabia, UAE, Indonesia?

Finnish specialists say that radicals come from all walks of life. Only typical things are weak identity, muslim heritage and young age.

Let's say 90% of ISIS supporters in France come from poor homes. If 90% of muslim homes in France are poor, we can't make any conclusions.

If you look who provides ISIS most fighters per capita of population, the leading countries in europe seem to be Belgium, Sweden and Denmark.[1] These are the countries which often rank "least racism in europe", though such rankings are not accurate.[2]

[1] [http://www.rferl.org/contentinfographics/foreign-fighters- sy...](http://www.rferl.org/contentinfographics/foreign-fighters-syria-iraq- is-isis-isil-infographic/26584940.html)

[2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating- map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just because Police found a cell phone used by the terrorists containing text messages that had been encrypted with Double ROT-13 cipher.

<comment><USER6> What's worrying about the Double ROT-13 cipher is that its use can be completely undetectable. It's thought to be the most common encryption method used by terrorists.

<comment><USER7> Your comment might be a little bit too subtle for most people, but quite amusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I live in Sweden, and the prime minister just went public with plans to increase surveillance and give the police extended rights to "surpass encryption", ie hack phones.

I do think the police should have the ability to, after a court ruling, to hack a phone, but the whole increased surveillance is just crazy. The terrorists attack our society for what it is, and the response is not to stand tall, but to change?

<comment><USER9> > I do think the police should have the ability to, after a court ruling, to > hack a phone

How do you think the smartphone would be secured against _unlawful_ hacking? How would it discriminate against lawful vs. unlawful attempts?

Phones should be unhackable to anybody, and any loophole should be treated as what it is in fact: an error that should be fixed.

Or maybe you meant that police should have computer security hacking forces, that is, personnel trained in breaking computer protection. In this case it would be OK.</comment></comment>


Some advanced bash scripting - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@starkcoffee/some-advanced-bash-scripting-a00524e29f8#.jyioghsku <comment><USER2> This is kind of lacking in content for something claiming to be "advanced", to say the least. "Defensive BASH programming"[1], which has been featured on HN before, contains a lot more useful advice.

Personally, I would also recommend using ShellCheck[2] to lint your scripts.

[1] [http://www.kfirlavi.com/blog/2012/11/14/defensive-bash- progr...](http://www.kfirlavi.com/blog/2012/11/14/defensive-bash-programming/)

[2] [https://www.shellcheck.net/](https://www.shellcheck.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> These are great resources, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's not advanced, it's not long enough, and it's not correct either.

> This will set the value of TMP to `/tmp/myproject` only if it has not been > set.

This should read "if", not "only if". And it should read: "This will set the value of TMP to `/tmp/myproject` if it has not been set _or if it is null_."

The form that means 'if it has not been set' has no colon; it is

      TMP=${TMP-/tmp/myproject}

See [https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Shell- Par...](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Shell-Parameter- Expansion)

</comment><comment><USER4> The first example has a lot more use cases than it alludes to. I have a lot of aliased utility scripts for text processing, and frequently need to use them over entire files as well as on output piped from other processes. In this case, I don't know if the input file is going to be an argument or stdin from some upstream operation. That's easily taken care of with

      INPUT_FILE="${1:-/dev/stdin}"

Which sets the input to the first argument if there is one, or stdin if there isn't. My solution was a lot messier before I learned about parameter substitution.

</comment><comment> joatmon-snoo Also, set -e is not a good flag to rely on, because it can really trip you up if you do anything at all that involves subshells, e.g.:

      set -e

      function foo {
          false
          echo foo
      }

      i=1
      while [[ i -le 20 ]]; do
          echo "$i $(foo)"
          i=$((i+1))
      done

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, but a whole lor shorter than what I expected to be honest.</comment>


Uber will start audio-recording rides as a safety measure - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/20/20974814/uber-audio-recording-rides-safety-rideshare-lyft <comment><USER2> This is one of the worst privacy and surveillance tech stories I have ever read in my life.

This idea is atrocious and a dangerous slippery slope promoting a 'norm' in which everyone in society is constantly being recorded, everywhere.

Socially and culturally people will censor themselves and stop being human anymore. This is anti-diversity and anti-consumer.

It will only serve the tech corporations' insurance policies. And what's to stop Uber secretly using the recordings for commercial big data purposes anyway?

It's also anti-business and makes no sense either way - what if a businessperson wants to discuss a private conversation that normally has legally-protected confidentially? Suddenly Uber has a permanent recording of that conversation, no matter what. That means less value as a service to me.

I will stop taking Uber if I know that this will start to be the service's default.

Or I'll just be quiet and explain to drivers that I don't feel like being listened to by default when I'm travelling in a car. Dehumanising, and anti- productivity.

It's always 'safety' and 'security' that takes away our most important rights.

<comment><USER3> I take Uber only occasionally, and this news makes me never want to touch it again. I have uninstalled the app and I'm looking into Lyft to see if they also have a similar policy, and if not, they will be the ones to get my occasional business.

I already worry about my smartphone spying on me (can't wait for Librem 5/PinePhone), now I have to worry about my taxi service doing it as well? Why is everyone so intent on listening to/watching me?</comment></comment>


Amazon Cloud Supported by 450,000 Servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/03/14/estimate-amazon-cloud-backed-by-450000-servers/

<comment><USER2> Actual headline:

 _Estimate_ : Amazon Cloud Backed by 450,000 Servers

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't know why Liu thought AWS would use blade servers. 1U commodity "pizza box" servers make the most sense by far. In-fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon was making their own servers (see Google <http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html>)

<comment><USER4> I agree. I don't know why Liu made that assumption. Most large scale data center operators agree that blades are not a good solution:

1\. Not cost effective because they don't benefit from the economy of scale of commodity hardware like pizza box servers.

2\. More expensive to operate as they often require redesigning/reinforcing cooling as they concentrate too much power in too little space.

3\. The space-saving advantage of blades doesn't address the root of the problem: any data center architect worth his salt will design a data center to be power-constrained, not space-constrained.

Liu should have read his source more extensively, James Hamilton, VP at Amazon Web Services, who has criticized blades for these exact reasons: [http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/09/11/WhyBladeServersA...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/09/11/WhyBladeServersArentTheAnswerToAllQuestions.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why not point directly to the original article? [http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data- center-s...](http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data-center-size/)

<comment><USER6> Here's a hint: <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1SockChuck>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"Photos from a 2011 presentation by AWS Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton show 1U "pizza box" rackmount servers rather than blades"_

Those look like 2U boxes to me. The slides even talk about a "rack of 20 servers with Top of Rack switch".

And it's been obvious from the start that EC2 instances are subdivisions of larger servers; given the sizes of servers involved, the power distribution and cooling issues would make using blades a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to see this method used against a cloud that discloses server numbers to see if it holds up. Seems like a lot of assumptions are being made.

</comment><comment><USER9> For some reason, I expected the number to be much, much higher.

3 or 4 years ago, a Rackspace sells rep told us that they managed over 500K servers. Never knew how true it was, never really doubted it.

<comment><USER10> Next time, ask them to clarify whether it's physical servers or virtual machines. They could easily have had 500K virtual machines running <100K physical servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone make an estimate on how much that would cost?</comment>


Celebrating Our 2 Year Simpleversary | Simple - <AUTHOR> https://www.simple.com/blog/two-year-simpleversary <comment><AUTHOR> They buried the lede, invitations are no longer necessary, you can sign up now:

> In the past, we've used invitations to help manage new customer volume. > Today, with a bigger team in place, we're ready to ditch the wait list. Sign > up now to get started in seconds, no invite necessary.</comment>


No Thanks, We're Using Heroku - <AUTHOR> http://www.opdemand.com/no-thanks-were-using-heroku/

<comment><USER2> Your pricing strikes me as way too expensive. What are your variable costs that justify a price of $249/month for three environments? Surely they can't be very large, since your service is basically a web interface (that's not any comment on the quality of it). Also, consider that the need for cloud management service is much lower with 1 environment than 3 environments. If you ask me, your introductory plan should be for 3 environments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the feedback. We've heard this from others. Then again, we have customers happily paying these prices. If you look at competitors in the space (RightScale, Scalr) we're on the lower end.

Keep in mind we include orchestration, monitoring, collaboration, real-time log feedback, command-line interface, REST API, not to mention EC2 templates for 1-click deployment of any open-source stack you can think of.

Besides making the introductory plan include 3 environments, any other suggestions on pricing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > We created open-source Puppet modules that provide compatibility with > Heroku's cedar stack (process management, dependency management, > concurrency)

If I had a Heroku app but wanted to move to EC2 that'd be great. The rest of the stuff doesn't seem that interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious. If you have a dozen or so Heroku apps and a few peers you collaborate with, what's your management strategy?

<comment><USER3> Would anyone actually do that? I run stuff on AWS using their excellent Java SDK and I'm quite happy about the flexibility that brings me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Firing off API calls with an SDK is great when you're a one-man operation.

At a certain point you need deployment automation that respects infrastructure dependencies, change tracking with an audit trail, an at-a-glance view of environments... all things AWS is not very good at. Though they're trying with OpsWorks.

How do you work around that stuff?

<comment><USER3> Home-grown dashboard. Works fine for now. It was quite a lot of work to build it but the code turned out nice and concise and I learned a lot in the process.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Design Principles Behind Smalltalk - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20070213165045/users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81/design_principles_behind_smalltalk.html <comment><USER2> "The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone."

This alone inspire me to do something with my kids using Smalltalk.</comment>


Google I/O Cancelled Due to Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/03/tech/google-i-o-canceled-coronavirus/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> Google I/O webpage has been updated with a message: [https://events.google.com/io/](https://events.google.com/io/)</comment>


TruffleSqueak: Polyglot Programming with Squeak/Smalltalk and GraalVM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hpi-swa/trufflesqueak <comment><USER2> It sounds very interesting but I don't understand the obsession of the smalltalk community with videos, it makes it impractical to get more info.

<comment><AUTHOR> Personally, I like watching good demo videos of systems I am not familiar with, and not everyone is familiar with Smalltalk. It's easy to set TruffleSqueak up on your machine if you like to experiment on your own. Apart from that, the README.md includes a list of blog posts and papers.

Anyway, I'd really like to know how we could improve and make it more "practical to get more info". Any thoughts or suggestions?

<comment><USER2> It's very nice to have videos and that must be a lot of work!

It's just that I like having those good old tutorials with text an few screenshots.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We have plans to create a tutorial soon and run it virtually during SPLASH/ECOOP'20 [1] (I have to check why the tutorial page is no longer public).

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20200319123703/https://2020.ecoo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200319123703/https://2020.ecoop.org/details/ecoop-2020-tutorials/1/Polyglot- Programming)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Happy to answer any questions!

<comment><USER3> Ever since Graal was opensourced I've been nothing short of mesmerized by all of the amazing work being done on/with it.

I'd love to just hear more about your experience building this on top of Graal/Truffle. Any interesting or surprising anecdotes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

> I'd love to just hear more about your experience building this on top of > Graal/Truffle.

There are lots of good resources for learning how to implement a language in Truffle. In addition to the official documentation and the GraalVM Slack, I often find myself looking at other GraalVM languages that are open source (e.g. Graal.js, SimpleLanguage, GraalPython). Also, the tooling available to language implementers is quite good (e.g. all debugging and profiling tools for Java, Truffle's language-agnostic tools, Ideal Graph Visualizer for analyzing Graal/Truffle graphs, Graal/Truffle command-line flags, ...).

> Any interesting or surprising anecdotes?

Supporting a Smalltalk system on the GraalVM definitely comes with interesting challenges, here are a couple of examples:

\- Truffle is designed for building AST interpreters. Squeak is based on the Smalltalk-80 specification, which includes a well-defined bytecode set. For compatibility, you want a bytecode interpreter for Smalltalk. We even wrote a paper about how to do this with Truffle: [https://fniephaus.com/2018/icooolps18-graalsqueak.pdf](https://fniephaus.com/2018/icooolps18-graalsqueak.pdf).

\- Implementing some core Smalltalk mechanisms (e.g. allInstances, thisContext, becomeForward:, ...) and make them work well with the Graal compiler.

\- Smalltalk is not just a language, but also a programming system. TruffleSqueak uses AWT/Swing for rendering the UI on GraalVM, and SDL2 when AOT-compiled with native image. Running UI applications with the Graal compiler, however, can yield interesting results. See for yourself: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuGVyzUsEqE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuGVyzUsEqE).

\- Saving the image without breaking compatibility with the OpenSmalltalkVM and other Smalltalk VMs.

\- Most languages are file-based, so Truffle's APIs are designed for files. In Smalltalk, everything -- even code -- is an object.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions. You may also find our paper on TruffleSqueak (formerly GraalSqueak) an interesting read: [https://fniephaus.com/2019/mplr19-graalsqueak.pdf](https://fniephaus.com/2019/mplr19-graalsqueak.pdf).

(edit: fix formatting and typos)

<comment><USER3> That bouncing atoms video just blew my mind. It took whole minutes, but it got so incredibly fast... Only to grind to a halt as soon as the workload changed just a little, haha.

I'd imagine you have a ton of bigger priorities, but being so hackable I wonder if there are easy tools within Graal/Truffle to hit that peak performance sooner and be stabler. I'd never expected it to stall so aggressively, probably worse than full GC.

Still, blown away.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Graal compiler is known to be slow in terms of warmup. At the same time, it provides great peak-performance. However, and as you can see in the video, partial evaluation will trigger recompilation if the program is not "stable". And when you're interacting with an IDE, it will take quite some time for the IDE to become stable. Even worse, some things like debugging sessions will never be stable.

Of course, it doesn't make much sense to run your IDE at +60FPS. Squeak usually throttles the frame rate, and then the performance cliffs are harder to notice.

Nonetheless, the GraalVM team is very much aware of these problems and is actively working on them. We are only the first to visualize this in the form of an IDE. A couple of GraalVM releases ago, they introduced libgraal [1], which improved compilation times significantly. One idea to make this even better is to persist compiled code from the JIT, so that it can be reused the next time you run the program/IDE. Morphic, Squeak's UI framework, is unlikely to change and could be warmed up in advance.

[1] [https://medium.com/graalvm/libgraal-graalvm-compiler-as-a- pr...](https://medium.com/graalvm/libgraal-graalvm-compiler-as-a-precompiled- graalvm-native-image-26e354bee5c)

<comment><USER4> Truffle team lead here. Yes we are working full steam on improving warmup and delays caused by going back to the interpreter in unexpected cases. Expect bigger improvements in this area soon.

That being said, we cannot do it all on the Truffle side without help of the language implementation. Truffle languages speculate on certain aspects of the program data. If they do so, then we need to deoptimize and invalidate the optimized code when this speculation is violated. So the stability of the language implementation really is an important factor. Questions like "do we need to speculate on this value being constant or does give us enough benefit to justify the deoptimization overhead?" need to be answered by the language implementation and not the Truffle framework. Afaik this was not a priority for TruffleSqueak so far, but it might be in the future. So there are potentialy future improvements also on the TruffleSqueak side.

<comment><USER3> I had no idea speculation was surfaced up through Truffle. That's so cool.

<comment><USER4> Well, it is necessary to expose this to language implementations to reach good performance. If we could reach the same performance otherwise, we would not expose it, as it makes implementing Truffle languages more complicated. Unfortunately automating the specializing part is an unsolved research question for a method based compiler (deserves its own PhD). Other trace based meta-compilation approaches (e.g. PyPy) have an advantage here, but disadvantages in other areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> em-bee previous discussion about trufflesqueak:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21735782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21735782)

and a general discussion of the graalvm from last week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24103233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24103233)

</comment><comment><USER5> yay this is great! <3

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you, kipply!</comment></comment>


Neural Renderer and Differentiable Rendering [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGJ4tEwhgo8 <comment><USER2> Self-Plug: If you're interested in a Jupyter notebook tutorial on implementing a basic differentiable path tracer (a physically based rendering algorithm), I wrote up a tutorial here: [https://blog.evjang.com/2019/11/jaxpt.html](https://blog.evjang.com/2019/11/jaxpt.html)

<comment><USER3> Great notebooks! While looking at the "cornell_box_pt_numpy.ipynb" one I noticed a few things odd:

\- The input colours to the walls are scaled by somehow arbitrary values and they don't seem to match the spectral reflectance distributions converted to, for example, sRGB:

        White
        -----
        Jupyter Notebook             : [255, 239, 196] / 255
        sRGB (Scene-Referred Linear) : [ 0.73825082  0.73601591  0.73883266]
        sRGB (Output-Referred)       : [ 0.87468844  0.87351472  0.87499367]

        Green
        -----
        Jupyter Notebook             : [.117, .4125, .115] * 1.5
        sRGB (Scene-Referred Linear) : [ 0.06816358  0.39867395  0.08645648]
        sRGB (Output-Referred)       : [ 0.28953442  0.66418933  0.32540958]

        Red
        ---
        Jupyter Notebook             : [.611, .0555, .062] * 1.5
        sRGB (Scene-Referred Linear) : [ 0.49389675  0.04880702  0.05120209]
        sRGB (Output-Referred)       : [ 0.73132279  0.24476901  0.2508128 ]

The correct values, assuming a sRGB working space, would be the middle rows, i.e. sRGB (Scene-Referred Linear).

\- The final image does not seem to be encoded for Output/Display, i.e. there is no gamma correction thus it is not displayed correctly.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, you are correct :) I chose the spectral reflectance distributions by tuning the values manually until it looked correct. And yes, I didn't do gamma correction (I deliberately ignored photometry related conversions) so that could explain why my tuning resulted in odd values.

<comment><USER3> Would be very easy to fix using the above numbers and adding proper encoding, even a naive gamma 2.2 would help :)

Here is a Gist for the spectral computations: [https://gist.github.com/KelSolaar/fb1e09b56b54d37d90e1886aef...](https://gist.github.com/KelSolaar/fb1e09b56b54d37d90e1886aef5ea4d4)

(It uses Colour: [https://github.com/colour- science/colour](https://github.com/colour-science/colour))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it's going to be possible for solo developers to create what we now consider to be AAA-quality games in the not too distant future.

It seems absurd, but not so much when you start looking at the implications of applying AI like this to every part of the development pipeline. Especially if the capability is eventually packaged up into commercial programs or integrated with existing engines.

Creating a detailed character model no longer will require a world-class artist working in ZBrush, but simply choosing a few images and asking the AI to interpolate, with the artist input simply being to weight certain areas by hand so as to update the [ML] model.

There's already work on AI-based procedural animation systems. I'm sure AI rigging isn't far off either, if it doesn't already exist.

Procedural worlds are due for a quantum leap in my opinion, far beyond what current state of the art is.

Eventually voice actors are going to be obsolete as well. The current state of the art in speech synthesis has demonstrated it's basically possible now using existing principles, it just needs a lot of refinement.

The hardest problem I can foresee is probably the automated creation of story, including NPC dialog and interactions. That's almost AGI-level hard, but it too is probably solvable by just evolving existing techniques.

People are going to be able to create their own version of The Matrix soon, and it won't require a $500M budget, let alone a $500k budget.

<comment><USER5> Without taking a position on future possibilities I think your point misses half the truth - if solo developers can create what we now consider to be AAA- quality games, the bar will raise. Consider the incredible tools at anyone's disposal for free* have not removed the need for a variety of talents to craft worlds and tell stories that make for compelling games.

One could draw comparisons to the availability of high quality film making equipment or incredibly realistic VST plugins for making orchestral scores. At its heart, the limitations of tools define the upper boundary of a medium or genre, but do not lift all creators to some upper limit of goodness.

*until sales reach a point that royalties must be paid, in the case of unreal engine

<comment><USER4> > _... I think your point misses half the truth - if solo developers can > create what we now consider to be AAA-quality games, the bar will raise._

The historical comparisons you're drawing aren't really comparable to having AI at every stage of the pipeline. When pervasive and done correctly, AI is very much another animal entirely.

For your VST example, a more apt comparison might be AI that composes music to the level of say, Hans Zimmer or John Williams. Without getting into the technical aspects, I believe doing so is merely an evolution of existing tech that we have today. It's hard, but it's achievable—especially when you have have imagery from scored films to train against.

So, the day that technology exists, an artist's involvement there might be as little as changing the AI's RNG seed until the AI cooks up something they like. If the output is as good as Zimmer or Williams, then what will distinguish artists who actually are that talented?

I believe the answer is virtually nothing, at least in a technical sense. However, there's a lot of people today who like their food cooked by a real person instead of made by automation, even if the taste is just as good. The human touch will always remain relevant, but I think that both avenues will eventually hit what you refer to as an upper limit of goodness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also a self-plug: our differentiable renderer "redner" also has a bunch of Jupyter notebook tutorials: [https://github.com/BachiLi/redner](https://github.com/BachiLi/redner)

</comment><comment><USER7> What's with the "includes paid promotion" label floating over the video? I don't think I've seen that before.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's Two Minute Papers disclosing that they've chosen to put a paid sponsor at the end of their video. [1]

[1] [https://wersm.com/youtube-creators-includes-paid- promotion-d...](https://wersm.com/youtube-creators-includes-paid-promotion- disclaimer-videos/)

<comment><USER7> Got it - I thought it was something YouTube started labeling. It felt distracting / in the way, like those end of the video links that always occlude the last bits of a video.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I drop out of college to go work at a startup? - <AUTHOR>

I am a sophomore cs major that has been programming since high school, and working full time as a front-end dev and designer for two years while doing other stuff like node.js, rails, and python for a year or so in my free time. I have recently been talking to a few startups reps for about jobs and have been thinking about dropping out and moving to SF. Am I less hirable without a degree? Will my experience make up for the education? Anyone been in this situation? <comment><USER2> No.

You can actually learn useful things at college. Take advantage of that. Over the long term, knowing technology X or Y matters way less than knowing the fundamentals.

I didn't realize I had a great CS education until I started working. I see a lot of my peers (both who went to college and who didn't) who can program but don't know enough.

Truly learn how a computer works. There shouldn't be any magic.

Write a compiler.

</comment><comment><USER3> College is not votech. This is your last chance to learn, soak things in like a sponge. Write a compiler, write an assembler, build a robot. Learn physics, take biology, master linear algebra. Go to a professor that intrigues you and offer to work on a project with them. Take some boring business classes and learn valuation techniques, and how to do DCFs. Build a robot. Go to the free evening concerts and learn you some Bach. Join the school TV studio and learn about that. Write a program for them to put interesting information on the screen during sporting events. TA an algebra class and learn to teach. Build a robot. Wander the library stacks, pull out a book that intrigues you, and find yourself reading about fossils, or signal processing, or 20th century ballet. Read a literary journal. Write some poems. Go sit in on Astronomy 101. Take some EE courses. Build a robot. Join ACM and set up some campus hackathons. Build a robot!

Strive. Excel. Learn what you are made of.

Or, you know, quit and go get you some cash.

IOW, college was friggin' awesome. I'd hate to go back, I'm done with assignments and directed learning, but wow did I drink deep when I was there. Plus, so much of what I've done in my career was only possible from college.

As an aside, you mentioned DC. If you stay there, you know how much work there is from the federal government there. Don't scoff, I did most of my stuff for the Government, and that included cancer statistics, flight computers, robots (have I mentioned robots yet?!), and more. Everything required a college degree. Both just in the job requirements (contracts required the workers have a degree), and then also in the nature of the work.

<comment><USER4> "This is your last chance to learn, soak things in like a sponge."

I think this is a terrible way to look at college v post-college.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it depends on the school you go to. If you're going to a school like MIT, Harvard, a good business school, good CS program etc...stay. Its all about the environment.

I went to an average business school in NY. Not up there with the Harvards of the world, but definitely not a low end community college. Somewhere in the middle.

Nothing at all that I learned has advanced my career or helped me in any way, shape or form. My professors were often 60+ years old, outdated and flat out boring. The student body was average - I was probably the most entrepreneurial there amongst a few others... But that's basically it.

Had I not gone to college, I probably would be much further along in my career - building my business and products. Also I would have more savings and no student loans.

So my point here is if you are at a top school that has a good program, faculty, interesting student body, programs, clubs etc. then stay - network, meet people, develop yourself and your career with those people around you. When you graduate you'll have amazing people and experience to tap into.

However, if you are at a average school like I was, maybe taking a leap and joining a startup isn't a bad idea. You can always go back to school if it wasn't what you expected.

It depends on how you learn as well. I wasn't a great student...I learned by doing and in my opinion that beats any classroom lecture.

</comment><comment><USER6> Be cool, stay in school.

I've seen some great devs make it without a degree. However, they have to work twice as hard to be considered equal. As others have noted, they never picked up some math or algorithmic concepts. It hurts in interviews as well as on- the-job moments if they're already hired.

I know parts of CS are boring and seem like most real-world jobs would never use the concepts, but once and awhile it comes up and when you don't get it, you fail.

<comment><USER7> I've also heard anecdotes on HN of people being pushed out when some higher-up learned they didn't have a degree, despite said higher-up singing their praises just weeks before.

Remember that NYC and Boston are burgeoning areas for startups. Rock that Acela.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would stay. Outside the networking opportunities, you can try and score some internships which are competitive but are an easier path to get into some companies.

Also, many of the bigs (Facebook, Netflix, Google, etc) have candidate interviews that are full of algorithms questions. Not having a degree can be a mark against you at a big company.

<comment><AUTHOR> The downside is that to even get an internship, I would still have to move somewhere else, not many startups in DC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMO: If you're not too bad off on money, finish college and work on startups as you finish it.

The amount of free time you have in college is ridiculous, and the gathering of minds is a real thing, if you have smart faculty, and you have smart students, use them (a lot of startup stories seem to start with "I got together with a friend of mine from college"). Also, a lot of the stuff in computer science that doesn't change over the years is what a good curriculum will teach.

As in, learn spanning tree algorithms, computer architecture (and why things are built how they are), graph theory, whereas you might be learning topics like "how dependency injection works in AngularJS" outside of school (which isn't BAD, but it's not timeless, graph theory is pretty timeless).

<comment><AUTHOR> Im not doing too bad(about 45k/per year) and still living at home (only 20yo). But how hard would it be to try and go to school while working at a startup style company after moving from out of state? I heard they are a lot more time consuming than normal companies (50-60 hours per week vs 40).

<comment><USER8> Well I actually meant if tuition wasn't too bad (unless that's what you were talking about) -- and you don't have to make excuses for living at home, cost benefits are super huge ;)

So I recently just graduated, and I worked (at internships during school AND summers, pretty much ~30 hrs a week), and I had plenty of free time, I just used it unwisely (generally).

I haven't worked in a startup, so I can't really give you the most accurate of time measurements, but if you're working on something you like, I'm pretty sure you won't even feel 50 hrs a week go by. Also, in a company that is fully aware that you are still in school shouldn't really be expecting 60 hours. And if they do, you can use that as leverage for more flexible working locations (like the ability to do most of your work from home/on-the-go). But generally it doesn't seem like any reasonable person would expect you to work 60 hours (as a new hire) while going to school. Doesn't seem healthy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another perspective: this need not be a binary 1/0 decision. At my school it's common to take a year off school to work and gain some real-world experience. I did after my third year of engineering and I'm very glad for having done so.

Why don't you view it that way? Then you can return to school if/when it doesn't work out, and still get the awesome experience and hopefully some $$$.

</comment><comment><USER10> needing college is a calculation of your planned life trajectory. I am finishing two degrees this year, law and economics with statistics and I can tell you 80% of the time you are wasting your time. however depending on your life plan that 20% may be the edge you need. but seriously if you dream of a startup career a degree is pretty much useless. I started learning code, from fundamentals, html intact, don't laugh, two months ago and I can say for a person with your experience you need not go to college, instead strive to create a new language within the next two years and chalk it off as college.

</comment><comment><USER11> no. I'm 40 and I'm working at yet another (my 8th) start-up. Take it easy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes, college does nothing to anybody. It's a scam. Even without the startup you should drop out.

<comment><USER13> I like your style

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been a working software developer for 15 years. Professionally, I've done everything I would have hoped to do if I'd had a degree. I've worked at Prestigious BigCo, Tiny Startup, Game Studio, and a couple others. I have zero college education. It has almost never come up. Hardly anyone has ever asked, and when they did, it was never a big deal. I once had one manager who kind of sneered at me a little bit over it - a little odd (?) considering he didn't have a degree either.

My advice is absolutely to stay on and finish your C.S. degree. Making the (safer) assumption that you're going to live to a ripe old age, the time you'll spend is really nothing much. The tech industry will not go anywhere without you (and it sounds like you're already working anyway). If you finish, you won't have the regret that I sometimes do. You won't feel like you have something extra to prove to your peers, that I sometimes do. You'll have a lot of extra academic options, like going to grad school, or teaching. You'll probably have a little extra self-confidence, and yes, after all, you'll learn _something_ that you might not otherwise.

You're already enrolled, you're already going - why not finish? If I had it to do again, I'd get a degree in C.S.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, for a while there I thought it was going towards the drop out route, but your second paragraph really made sense. I guess I'm in such a rush to jump in seeing all these young guys working at startups, i'm afraid i'll miss the boat and next thing I know I'm too old and washed up for the hip young startup guys.

<comment><USER15> Aside from learning academically, you should also make good friends in college. Much of business and life is about who you know, and right now you are in a place where everyone is interested in meeting new people and learning. Make good use of that time.

I started my startup when I was 31, and I'm doing fine, so really there is no rush... (unless you are working on the next big thing with your roommates and all of you decide to drop out.)</comment></comment></comment>


CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/hotshot-ceo-aaron-levie-will-only-own-4-1-of-box-when-it-ipos-investor-dfj-owns-25-5/?utm_campaign=fb&ncid=fb <comment><USER2> IIRC PayPal was very similar - it was sold for $1.5B, but Max Levchin's share was only about $30M, and Elon Musk's was only about $100M. By comparison, many early Web 2.0 darlings (Del.icio.us, Blogger, Flickr) sold for only $20-40M, but their founders had only taken small seed rounds, and so the vast majority of the purchase price went to the founders. 75% of a $40M acquisition = 3% of a $1B acquisition.

Something for founders to think about when they're taking funding. If you look at the gigantic tech fortunes - Gates, Page/Brin, Omidyar, Bezos, Zuckerburg, Hewlett/Packard - they usually came from having a company that was already profitable or was already well down the hockey-stick user growth curve and had a clear path to monetization by the time they sought investment. Companies that fight tooth & nail for customers and need lots of outside capital to do it usually have much worse financial outcomes.

<comment><USER3> This. Founders are better served maximizing traction at the lowest outside investment possible. If it doesn't become big, then you still hold a large chunk of a small company. And if does, then you hold a fairly large chunk of a large company.

<comment><USER4> I don't know it seems to me that Silicon Valley is littered with folks who've made a shit ton of money by founding companies and taking chunks off the table during funding rounds. Kevin Rose/Digg come to mind. This way if you become huge you still get a payday but even if it doesn't you're still a millionaire (and maybe an angel investor in companies that do become huge, Kevin Rose/Digg comes to mind).

<comment><USER2> You typically need leverage to do this too. Zuckerburg was famous for popularizing the practice, but he could only do it because Facebook was taking off like a rocket ship and everybody wanted in. It's very rare that a startup without traction could successfully negotiate founder cash-outs.

<comment><USER5> Another SV thing.. being able to fire your board: priceless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And the average engineer who thought they'd be rich, probably owns 0.0002%. Have fun with your 200k! Startups are such a scam for the employees.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious what kind of warped perspective allows someone to scoff at a $200,000 windfall and where I can acquire such a perspective.

<comment><USER6> are you serious? How much do you make? Remember we are talking $200k pretax. So maybe $120k after taxes. That's less than half a down payment on a shit house in this area. That's maybe one year of market value cash compensation for an engineer with 5 years experience.

I'm not saying it's nothing, but remember that we are talking about this being one of the rare startup equity "success stories" that you hear about so often in the media.

Of course, I'd take a $200k windfall and be happy for a few days, but it's hardly a life-changing amount of money. I save that much money every 18 months (remember pretax). I wouldn't consider myself wealthy unless I had 50x that amount in the bank

<comment><USER8> Except I also read in other threads that you comment on spending $5/day on food. And not living in SF because you can't or won't afford to.

So it is entirely possible that you are min-max'ing your life goals in an outlier fashion (which is your perfect right, don't mistake me).

<comment><USER6> I don't make 250k, but I am pretty frugal overall. I'm not a foodie, so I'd rather spend that money elsewhere. I cleared just under $200k with bonus last year

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sets alarm bells off for me, of the kind saying the large investors are looking to claw as much back as possible via IPO because the core business isn't as viable as they thought. Demonstrating profitable quarters in the run up to IPO is highly valuable, so if they aren't doing that . . . yuck.

DropBox, for better or worse, appear to have cleaned up on the consumer front, and you'd have to be blind to not notice the trend these days is consumer tech getting into enterprise IT, and not vice versa. GDrive isn't too hot, yet, but I'm sure they'll eventually get there. Then MS probably have the biggest motivation to chase the enterprise market.

Sorry Box, I just don't see this working out at all. Something smells bad.

<comment><USER10> i have started to see it used in the construction industry, when the general contractor already has some infrastructure typically on a windows domain. that is where they are going to push for further and further integration for business and project mgmt

<comment><USER11> But MS is pushing their product now and is in a war with Google to basically give this stuff away for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not surprising given they raised 11 rounds, including series A-F, and have cumulatively raised over 400M

<comment><USER13> Exactly. If you raise that much money and are still have net losses higher than your revenues, you won't own much equity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it possible that he's already cashed out some of his shares privately? (Get himself some liquidity prior to an exit.)

<comment><USER15> He's almost certainly cashed out partially. You don't get to Series F without cashing out.

<comment><USER16> tagline for the future Box tell-all movie?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Random question: When a company finally IPOs, how much equity are the top guys expected to hold onto?

I know it's common for founders to be allowed to cash out some of their equity during financing rounds, usually enough to make them comfortable (a few million).

The reason I ask is if you're Aaron Levie and Box IPOs, are you expected to not sell much of your remaining stake unless you leave the company? It just reminds me a little of the investment banks where partners understood that it was frowned upon if they sold their equity. Many of them lost everything when the banks collapsed (some would say rightfully so).

<comment><USER18> Here's data on equity ownership at the time of IPO for 258 companies: [http://www.slideshare.net/lebret/equity-in-258-high-tech- sta...](http://www.slideshare.net/lebret/equity-in-258-high-tech-start-ups- lebret-mar2014)

The average overall was 7.6%, but it varies a lot, from close to 0% (Zipcar) up to 28% (Amazon).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 4% for a company like Box is pretty consistent (maybe slightly higher).

[http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/10/14/understanding-...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/10/14/understanding- how-dilution-affects-you-at-a-startup/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I view this as being smart. Box is under heavy competition not just from Dropbox, but from Google and Microsoft. 4% of $250 million is better than 50% of $0. The landscape is littered with founders who drank the koolaid and thought they were going to billions and ran their companies into the ground. Maybe Levie won't own 50% of Box, but maybe he will own 4% of a viable company with a real business going forward. And if all else fails, he'll walk away with $10 million.

That's a "problem" I'm sure many of us would like to have.

<comment><USER21> They'd be raising $250mm in the IPO. That wouldn't be the valuation of the company. Presumably, it'd be >$2B which was the value of their last private round.

Your point stands in that 4% of that isn't too bad either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I agree with the article that since startups are pass/fail, the founders must due whatever they have to do to succeed. Marc Andreesen says to even take that highly diluted fourth round to get to product/market fit and increase your chances of success. [http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee204/ProductMarketFit.html](http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee204/ProductMarketFit.html)

<comment><USER23> "Venture capitalist says you should always follow his business plan" non- shocker.

<comment><USER22> What he says is you should get to product/market fit. If you don't get there then whatever business plan you have will fail and so will you. When Aaron dilutes himself massively he does so to buy time to get to product/market fit. Only by dong so can he later turn on the growth engine and know that users will stay and love the product. A top VC knows that he can never trick a founder into making him a large exit. The founder just needs the "right" plan, not "his" plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> He could have had more if he wanted to scale slower, but he wanted to get as big as possible as quick as possible.

</comment><comment><USER25> How much does Mark Cuban have now? (350K as only Angel)

<comment><USER16> cuban sold his shares to DFJ during their series A in 06 due to disagreements: [http://pando.com/2014/01/31/box-is-the-unicorn-that-mark- cub...](http://pando.com/2014/01/31/box-is-the-unicorn-that-mark-cuban-let- get-away/)

<comment><USER26> The Cuban comment in that thread is interesting:

"I didn't miss a thing. When a company raises hundreds of millions of dollars I would have been diluted to nothing. But the bigger issue is that I'm not a fan of situations where you have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to do tens of millions in sales. It's a lesson learned from the tech bubble

It was one thing when the valuation as a multiple of sales was in stock. It's a bigger thing when that multiple is my cash."

<comment><USER5> Box needs to monetize on enterprise add-ons. There's a huge pile of cash there if they hustle ahead and steal Dropbox's lollipop.

Further, nurturing and gobbling up feature plays. Gotta pull off a "Siri."

Finally, tons more integrations (other apps, more language sdks and some videos showing off some neat use-cases at open source conferences).

<comment><USER27> advice pulled out of from where the sun does not shine... really, give talks at open source conferences, that would raise value how much? or library for brainfuck?

<comment><USER5> Having dev evangelists presenting cool shit gets people aware of your platform and it's free marketing, the best kind.

Further, Java, Python, Ruby, Obj-C, Android and C# isn't complete. [0] JS for browser front-end and node back-end is clearly missing or third-party. A somewhat smaller shop, Segment.io, has all of those and PHP and Clojure. And a metric ton of integrations comparatively. [1] [2]

[0] [http://developers.box.com/sdks/](http://developers.box.com/sdks/)

[1] [https://segment.io/libraries/analytics.js](https://segment.io/libraries/analytics.js)

[2] [http://blog.box.com/tag/integrations/](http://blog.box.com/tag/integrations/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Remind me again why entrepreneurs invite VC's in?

</comment><comment><USER29> "If you have a gun, you can only rob a bank. If you have a bank, you can rob everyone."

</comment><comment><USER30> He got totally Goxxed.</comment>


Show HN: I made a multiplayer web game with Elm - <AUTHOR> https://qdice.wtf <comment><USER2> Kudos. I really wanted to learn Elm to have a type safe way to write widgets that third parties would run on their sites. Seemed like Elm would have given me type safety + small bundle size.

Due to issues w/ websockets in Elm 0.19 I went with Angular, resulting bundle is 440k before gzip. Not great, not terrible...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using MQTT over websockets, so I had to use ports anyway. IMHO, it would be nice to have websockets integrated, but wiring a bunch of ports is no big deal.

<comment><USER2> Nice. It was too much work compared to using Angular. Hope you had fun with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How did you find it?

Would you use Elm again?

Are there anythings you wish you knew before you started?

<comment><AUTHOR> > How did you find it?

Elm wants to get beginners into functiona programming, it did it for me very well. I've only used C-like languages before, tried Haskell but didn't grok it.

There are a lot of FP tools for JS, but there really is nothing is like being _actually_ pure and typesafe.

I've never been able to modify or add features so fast to a grown project in my life. And with confidence that there will be no runtime errors.

> Would you use Elm again?

Definitely, so much as being willing to fight teeth and nails to be able to use it at work too. I just can't fathom the dread of JS/TS runtime errors anymore.

> Are there anythings you wish you knew before you started?

Do not try to build "components" in React fashion. It pops up every so often in r/elm etc. In my opinion, you can _either_ slice and isolate you UI into components but smearing the state all over (React), or you isolate by state and smear the "components" across (Elm). It's orthogonal to each other and there is no in between.

I wish I had known Elm-UI or Tailwind.css. Now I have a typical mess of half- assed BEM, afraid to touch any line of it.

Also using SVG to draw the game, while it lets get started fast, isn't very performant. It shouldn't be hard to change.

I have almost no unit tests for the frontend part, because the type system covers so much. Then for the "larger" things that aren't really covered by types, they would be awkward as unit tests too, and I dislike integration tests, so I have some end-to-end tests for that.

Ports can be awkward, I wish there were there different kind of ports. Something to synchronously "get" a value, and something to do an async request/response.

Cyclic dependency errors (of modules) can be really irritating. I usually opted for sharing types in a submodule, or in the one global types module.

<comment><USER4> What resources you used to learn elm? I'm looking for a good book on 0.19 elm that is written to folks who can already program (probably even in functional style and just want to learn the specific tricks of elm).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not a book person, so I can't help you with that.

I just started getting my hands dirty, I used [https://guide.elm- lang.org/](https://guide.elm-lang.org/) IIRC.

Also make sure to checkout the slack channel, especially #beginners, it's very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My first reaction was, "How do you make a game using an email client?"

<comment><USER6> There have been approximately zero posts about elm the email client in the last ten years and probably close to a thousand about the front end frame work. Further more, the elm email client last had a stable release 15 years ago. And also this same "joke" has been made in every thread about elm and it is beyond tired.</comment></comment>


Reducing Docker Intermediate Layers and Dockerfile Complexity - <AUTHOR> http://www.psidox.com/reducing-docker-intermediate-layers-and-dockerfile-complexity

<comment><USER2> I know this is not the solution you are looking for, but here's what I do, when I want a small image after a complex dockerfile and I don't care to distribute it as layers:

      docker run layered-image -n container /bin/echo #noop
      docker export container > tarball.tar
      cat tarball.tar | docker import - flat-image

This has the disadvantage that your new flat image doesn't have any CMD directive. You can add it with another dockerfile, starting with FROM flat- image, and skipping straight to CMD ["/bin/bash", "/bootstrap.sh"]</comment>


TimeBleed: Attack to see if a user has visited a site recently - <AUTHOR> https://chaoswebs.net/blog/timebleed-breaking-privacy-with-a-simple-timing-attack.html <comment><USER2> cool :)</comment>